Unpregnant (NC16)
99 minutes/Premieres Feb 6 on HBO Go and HBO/4 stars
Comedies about pregnancy are usually centred on women or couples being forced to grow up quickly. This comedy, however, is about a teen thrust into adulthood because she wants an abortion.
Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson) is pregnant. Because her home state requires parental consent for minors, the pretty, popular high-schooler is forced to make overtures to estranged childhood friend and social outcast Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) because she has a car. With it, they can make a secret 14-hour trip to the nearest no-consent clinic.
This road-trip movie's breeziness does not undercut or trivialise its message of sympathy for girls like Veronica, who are shamed first for having sex and then for dealing with its consequences.
Adapted from a young adult novel of the same name, this work by director Rachel Lee Goldenberg is a funny, moving coming-of-age story featuring winning performances by Richardson and Ferreira.
Assassins (PG13)
104 minutes/Showing exclusively at The Projector/4 stars
The 2017 murder of Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur International Airport was remarkable for just how weird it was. The women arrested for it claimed to be hired to perform a prank.
And the killing was alleged to have been done at the behest of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, half-brother of the murdered man.
American director Ryan White makes award-winning films that fight for a cause, whether it is for same-sex marriage (The Case Against 8, 2014) or to put a spotlight on an unsolved murder (The Keepers, 2017).
This engrossing true-crime story gets its emotional centre from the women on death row: Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong.
White gets long, heartbreaking interviews with them and their families, and filmed in their home countries to capture the economic conditions that made them go to Malaysia in search of a better life.
Caught In The Net (R21)
100 minutes/Now showing/3 stars
Co-directors Barbora Chalupova and Vít Klusak hired three actresses over the age of 18, but who looked 12, to pose as children on social media.
Behind the scenes, they create three film sets that look like bedrooms, and have counsellors and legal experts standing by. Their goal is to catch a paedophile.
Within hours, the girls net thousands of chat requests from older men. And within minutes of chatting, the gruesomeness begins - requests for nudes, sexual grooming, inboxes flooded with genitalia selfies.
There are many paedophilia documentaries in which journalists interview victims and pick over the traces left by the crime, with the help of re-enactments. This one immerses the viewer in the horror as it is unfolding.
At times, the frankness feels like lurid scaremongering, a feeling reinforced by the film's hand-wringing over predators, with little said about how to stop it.
